Speaker 1: Hey everyone, this is Tyler Swatt, Accessible Media Specialist, the Iowa Library for the Blind and Print Disabled. So today the webinar is going to be talking about LMS and accessibility, or Learning Management Systems and Accessibility. So there are a few different things that I just want to talk about for a little bit and then we'll kind of go over some examples and I'll go online and kind of show you guys what I'm talking about and sort of how to eliminate some of the barriers and pitfalls that exist. So when we talk about Learning Management Systems, it's sort of been a buzzword of this school year. It's sort of online learning, e-learning is another term for it, but the Learning Management System would be where that online learning lives. So the big examples that I'm going over today would be like Google Docs, Google Classroom, as well as Blackboard. Those are the two that I'm going to be kind of glancing over. I'm not talking about exactly like how to fix accessibility issues today, more of it's going to be about barriers to accessibility on those Learning Management Systems, as well as how to make sure that what you're doing as far as getting information onto those Learning Management Systems is accessible. I do have some other videos where I go over some of the detailed steps on how to fix those, which you can check out on our YouTube channel. So that's kind of where I'm going to leave it at that. So when we talk about the pitfalls or barriers that exist with a Learning Management System, the first one is going to be limited tech experience. So this could be the student or the teacher. When we talk from the student end, if there's a student that's used to being in the classroom, used to having print Braille that they get by the teacher, or get their TVI, or somebody gives them the Braille of what they're learning, or they have a Braille textbook, when you transition online, it could be a student that has never used a screen reader or doesn't have an experience with using a screen reader or experience using electronic Braille, which then can create that barrier. And so I think that having your student be aware and using some of those skills while they are in the classroom, but also just kind of helping mediate any of those tech issues when they go home, if they are going to be online for any period of time, I think is really beneficial. And then on the teacher end, it's just that it's more of the accessibility knowledge that exists, where they don't have that base of what they need to do to make their class more accessible online. A lot of the things that we'll talk about today are not overly difficult, they do take a little bit of time. But once you kind of get the hang of it, it makes a lot more sense about why you need it. And just sort of how the best practices of accessibility can help make your online class easier for all your students, not just you know, some of the things I'm going to show some examples of things, you know, the main focus all the time, you know, is always those low vision and blind students. But some of the things that I'm going to show you guys, they can benefit all your students. It doesn't have to necessarily be for those low vision or blind students. And once, you know, you get through the tech experience with teachers and students, the next thing to think about is just the curriculum accessibility. So if you're not using Google Classroom and using Blackboard, you know, it could be a different system. When the school district purchases that, they need to check these things out to see if it isn't just a bunch of PDFs that a screen reader can't pick up on or, you know, color contrast that is just way off. So these are the things that need to be checked way in advance to make sure that it's accessible for your students when they are online. And that's a big one, I think, that gets overlooked sometimes where they see, you know, a flashy new car, but don't necessarily check to see if it works for all their needs. So that's, I think, really important really early in that process is to make sure that you have your students in mind by checking accessibility for the curriculum that you're going to be using. Now, one of the other thing when we talk about curriculum accessibility, we're talking about Google Classroom or Blackboard is the, you know, the platforms themselves are fairly accessible. You can use them with a ton of accessibility features built into them. So usually when we run into barriers, it's what is going on to those platforms. So when a teacher is putting up a document into Google Classroom, into Google Docs, is it a scanned document, you know, from a workbook that they put up for the kids to fill out and then email them the results? Or is it a picture of something without any explanation for it? It's those types of things that really bog down a system for a low vision or blind student, because when you put up a scanned document, that's just that's, you know, scanned PDF, a screen reader is not going to read that at all. So you're leaving that student in the dust. And and yes, you can, you know, you could get it Braille, you could get it print Braille and then send it to that student. But by having just it in place from the start of just making sure that it is accessible and making sure that it is put up in the correct format, then that'll save the efficiency of you, the teacher, as well as giving a student the best chance to not fall behind because you want them to be on par with the rest of their peers in that class. And having something by the teacher is not putting the right form of document up is a big deal. So, you know, the best example of that, you know, if you have a PDF, the best option is to make sure you made that from a Word document that was built correctly. You know, most of the time putting Word documents up is the best route or just making it in Google Docs and then adding that to the classroom is probably going to be your best route just because then, you know, it's accessible and, you know, all students can use it and there's accessibility features built in. As far as specifics within those documents, that's what we're talking about, like headings and all text and other things. And so, like I said, I'm not diving in a whole lot to that. I do have other videos that when I do post this on YouTube, I'll put a link to that, the link to those videos so you can kind of walk through some of those steps to to help make your documents more accessible. But that's probably the biggest thing is that teachers are just putting up, you know, the the unaccessible versions of what they're teaching, you know, whether it's like I kind of, you know, if it's a page out of a textbook or a page out of a worksheet that they just scan and put it up as a picture or, you know, it's something that they've always taught it this certain way. And so they just put their notes up like that. And so then it just doesn't help that student that needs those assistive technologies. So what I'm going to kind of do now is I'm going to jump in and we're going to kind of go over what accessibility looks like on Blackboard, what accessibility looks like on Google Docs, and then just a couple. And we'll also look at Google Slides a little bit, too, because I think and it's I think a really helpful tool that not as many teachers use as far as within that learning management system. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen here. So we're going to go to here. All right, so. We are looking to take to. OK, so we're in Blackboard now, so this is on the teacher side of Blackboard. So I'm just going to kind of walk through like really basic stuff and what what you're looking for when you put new information up to make sure it's accessible. So I'm in my ultra course one, my super fake course, and I'm going to click on that arrow here and then click create. So this is creating something new for the. For this class, so let's say it's a document, so here's I have a couple options, I can add content, upload a computer, upload from my cloud or upload from the cloud. This is when you're uploading, making sure that it's a Word document, even if it's a read only Word document, that's better than putting up an unaccessible PDF. So just things like that, making sure we name our document, things that make sense, you know, even with the data in there, but just like making sure that is read. So when a screen reader does read it, the student knows what they're on. But if we're going to go to add content, let's say I'm just going to put something new up here and I'm going to homework for today. Right. And so then I'm going to link a couple other things underneath here. What's what's nice about Blackboard is that a lot of it's already built in and they sort of force you into some of these accessibility features, which is really nice. So the first thing is textiles. This is where, you know, if it is the title, making sure you change that. If it's the header, making sure you change it or if it's just, you know, general text that it's that it's in that paragraph format. And so for longer documents, that's just going to help students really navigate easier and just help them work through there. The other things they do a really good job of building in. So if we go over to a picture here, insert image from the web, you're going to put the image URL there and then it gives you a space for all text. So all text is really important for screen readers. It's really important to make sure that your students understand what the picture is. And so that's why I really like that. They just build it in already in here. So before you can even load it up, boom, you got to put all text. Same with with things not that one. Same with things like is even embedding videos. You're going to insert a media URL. It's going to give you the all text so you can say, you know, this you're talking about the video that, you know, whatever you're learning about and you can kind of spell it out in the all text. So it's little things like that that go really long away with with Blackboard that I like and just making sure that you're you're doing those things. That you're, you know, you're just taking the time to fix the issues that you need to fix to make it accessible. So that's just really, really, really important. But I do like the way that they make it simple and they automatically force you to put those things like all text in there. So that makes a big difference. But the biggest one, again, is when you are building it and you're uploading things from your computer that they are accessible documents, they're named correctly and that it's a Word document. I would err on the side of Word document over PDF unless you absolutely know what you're doing. Know to make sure that it is accessible. Now, if we jump over to Google Docs. So this is just a fake template of a brochure for like a new phone. I think it's just a good way to kind of just to show it off. So I already have the accessibility tab up. If you don't have that up, if you go to tools and all the way down to accessibility settings, my having turn screener support on that will bring up this accessibility tab. So it's more for students using it, you know, as they navigate through. This gives them all the hot keys for it, but they also can do it. You know, they can just sort of click their way through. But it is nice just to know how to get there. So, again, that's in tools and down at the bottom. You know, for here, same thing. It's just making sure that if you are if you're going to build a document within Google Docs, that you're doing styles with the heading or subtitle or just paragraph, normal text. They don't call it paragraph. They call it normal text for the base and then just making sure you're adding those things with with all text and pictures and just other, you know, accessibility features. Most of the time, if you're building it within Google Docs, you should be OK. And Google Classroom does a really good job. I'm going to go to Google Classroom, just kind of show from an accessibility standpoint. So here's my fake class, just naming things correctly. But then when you you know, so this is that other document I showed earlier to just making sure that things are labeled correctly, but also as you go through and add more things to this, you're just putting things in the correct order and making sure that once again, it's more of that material going up on that page. That's that's that's the biggest issue that we run into. You know, when when a class is saying, you know, we want or a teacher saying we need this Braille and then they send us PDFs rather than having access to the Google Classroom where it is accessible would eliminate us having to go that route of trying to figure it out, how to fix it. So when we go to create. All of these, the way you're going to, you know, even if you go quiz, assignment, question, all of these are accessible with the screen reader. So once again, it's not that it's not the platform itself. So this is why we're adding Rubik's, we're adding attaching files to it and other things, just making sure that they are what they need to be. I know I'm kind of a broken record with that, but that's really honestly one of the biggest things that you can do to fix that is just making sure you're putting up accessible documents that work on that page. Now, one other thing, I think that when we get into Google Slides, I think it's important. So all those other things I talked about are important as far as making sure that everything fits. Now, if you're giving this to a student to check out later, so you're going to send them a bunch of your Google Slides. You know, that's what I think it's really important to go through and make sure you have the right text like we kind of talked about earlier, making sure you have the alt text on your pictures and those types of things. But one feature I think that people really miss out on is I'm going to go into presentation mode here and do closed captioning. So if you record yourself giving a presentation so you could do it through Zoom, you could do this from other programs. You can have live captions as you talk. So if you notice down there at the bottom, captions are popping up as I talk and it's incredibly accurate for what it is. And you can change the settings on this as well. So it's bigger text, but also as you would give this presentation, it would save the text that you're saying. And so I think that, you know, if you're giving a presentation, you want to say that you're going to put it up on Google Classroom, you're going to put it up on Blackboard later. I think this is a great tool to use to have those live captions for all your students because then there'll be a transcript involved with the presentation that student that you could give to your students later. You know, if you went on a long rant on one slide, then you would have all that information that you talked about and being able to present it to a student with that transcript. Or if students watch it back later, you know, they have the text there and just, you know, they can just read it and learn from it in a different format, which makes it more accessible. Talking more about that universal design for learning and really just helps all of your students. Now, it does mess up a little bit, you said, you know, all your students, so that's the one thing you have to enunciate a little bit, but for what it is, I think it's pretty fantastic. Quit out of that, but so that's one thing within Google Slides that I think is really, really great from there. So I think, you know, like I kind of said, it's just what you're putting up there. I'm going to link the videos to kind of what we've done in the past about how to fix certain accessibility issues to to make your documents better and some other things about universal design. So there'll be in that corner that you can kind of check out and and really just kind of deep dive in. Also, feel free to reach out and email me if you guys have any questions about accessibility within your learning management systems. So it's Tyler.Sweat at blind.state.ia.us and I can kind of help mediate any issues you're having or kind of get you on the right path about what you need to know. So, yeah, feel free to reach out and check out our other videos that we have on the channel. We've been really doing a lot more and building a lot more content for our patrons as well as anybody in the educational field just to kind of help make their life a little more accessible. And, you know, when we look at education this year and being online, I think it's even more important than it always has been to make sure that we're making everything accessible to allow all of our students to learn and to be successful. Again, this has been Tyler Sweat and thanks for hanging out.